Renegade
by Delusional Fishies
Summary: He was never a normal child, even around his peers. Living in a hidden world within a hidden world where mystery is power, all he has is his single secret. Demons, myths, and gods are all alive. For him, everything is real, yet nothing is permitted.


**The Renegade**

"_Is that a real snake?" One of the more curious boys asked aloud, his hand looming over me like the shadow of a giant. I panicked, trying to shrink away, as I'd long learned my lesson about these kinds of things...but as I'd already been cornered in a dead-end alley by boys several times my size, there was no possible escape._

_Any hope of escape vanished entirely as a grubby, sweaty palm clasped around my forearm – my cousin, as I saw as I turned a fearful glance behind me. _

_To me he was a giant. At the time, his grasp was terrifying, able to grab my arm five times over, though whether this was a testament to his size or my lack thereof, I never understood. _

_As you know, I never had the most normal of childhoods._

"_Hey, Polkins said he wanted a look." My cousin's inflated, red cheeks puffed as he spoke. It was a quirk of his as a child at the time. We were only six, so it was rather adorable to the adults, I believe._

_I tried to squirm away, but having three of them in front of me and my cousin holding my arm did not make moving easy for me. Of course, I… _Oh, I see what you're doing. No. No, no, no, we're going to take this slow and by the sequence that I want to tell it.

"_N-no, wait, she's just a garden snake," I protested, saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time._

_One of the other boys' eyes lit up with delight. _

"_So Big D wasn't lying! Well, I'll be!" He laughed, reaching around to grab at her - my friend the snake -roughly._

_When something that many times larger than you has you cornered and seems like it's attacking you, you would do what? Run away, maybe? But what if you can't run away? Do you just let yourself be taken?_

_No. That wasn't the way of nature, I thought at the time._

_I would soon learn how right I was, as my friend took a nice, meaty bite of the other boy's forefinger. She even drew blood! _

_I was delighted, of course, but I couldn't say that. It wasn't the first time I've seen blood, but it was certainly rare that I saw blood that wasn't my own._

"_It bit me! That… that thing bit me!" the boy shrieked like a little girl, recoiling._

Of course it bit you_, I wanted to shout. _

_At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to jerk away from my cousin's grasp, to grab my friend from her tormenter and run far, far away. …alas, I was (and probably still am) a coward. I…hm, perhaps that's not the right way to say it. Either way, I was shocked and unsure of what to do. _

_So…I froze._

_But the boys? They didn't freeze. They just _reacted.

_In boys of our age, if someone pushes you, you push back or else you'd be bullied for what seems forever to our limited understanding of time, and such was the cruelty of children, ignorant yet harsher than grown adults, that this group of children went beyond balancing the scales and all the way to cold, bloody revenge._

_Dudley was their leader, even then. So he was the first to push me aside._

_I felt my head hit—_not quite smash but not quite tap_—the brick wall behind me. My sight was already blurred because of the piece of shit glasses that I had worn for years, but now I couldn't even stand straight. I could barely see what they were about to do and I could do nothing about it either. I slid and fell, leaning against the walls._

"_You want to bite one of Big D's boys, eh?" Big D sneered as he grabbed her by the head, just below the skull, as she wriggled and flailed about to no avail. He'd seen me handle her before – and this imitation proved to be enough to contain my friend. _

_I…I can still remember her pitiful cries for help._

_They threw her against the ground, played with her like a whip, before finally stomping on her. Stomping… stomping… stomping… heh. It's…_

* * *

><p>"Are you talking to yourself?" A voice spoke from the doorway with a tone of amused disbelief. I turned around to see a dark skinned lad, probably around my age, but rather shorter than I was, something I didn't think was possible at the time. He stared at me with the strangest glance before shaking his head and saying, "Well, I'm a weirdo too, so why not?"<p>

With that, he walked into my compartment and sat down.

Being the courteous gentleman that I was, I started the conversation with a, "So I'm Harry."

"Huh," the boy replied, before sitting down and pulling out a thin booklet and a pen. His thick eyebrows furrowed into a frown, but he wasn't glaring at me anymore. Then he placed his pen behind his ear, hidden away by his curly hair, and nodded away reading his booklet. I couldn't see what the title of it was, but it was something about making people and influencing friends or something like that.

For the next five uncomfortable minutes, neither of us spoke, though towards the end of that span of time, I had gotten an itch to say… well, something. Having had my manners literally beaten into me, I was put out that this boy wouldn't say anything.

After he flipped through however many pages that he did, I asked, "So what's your name?"

"Amit," he replied in the same bored tone.

"So are you Indian?" I've heard of those Indian people from Uncle Vernon, you see – he called them Asian. What the bigot had to say about them wasn't pretty, but really, if he disliked them, I was willing to bet they couldn't be all that bad.

He finally looked up from his book, but I think I would have rather had him not do so upon seeing his expression. It was a simple one that asked, "Are you stupid?" without any effort on his part at all. And without any effort on his part, I felt rather humiliated…though I didn't know why.

We stared at each other for what seemed to be several seconds, before he verbally echoed his unspoken question: "Are you stupid?"

I gaped slightly, appalled at the utter rudeness of the question, but answered quickly.

"I don't…think so?"

"You…" he trailed off, as if staggered by the sheer volumes of what he perceived of stupidity rolling off of me. "You come to a place like this and you…you….I bet you haven't even read your books yet!"

Silence hung in the air for a moment, with the two of us just staring at each other before I could work up some kind of response to this apparent _non-sequitur_.

"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked, being part curious and part indignant for myself. I knew when someone was insulting me and I actually haven't touched my books yet, but I didn't want to associate with someone with his attitude much longer. I might have been weak, little Harry back then, but here I could be something… more.

"What does that have to do with anything?" He repeated mockingly, actually setting his book down and opening our compartment door before turning back to me. He then asked, "Do you want me to ask everyone on the train your question or do you want to think about it for a second?"

I frowned at him, telling him I really didn't know.

The look on his face made me only feel madder at the boy, beginning to understand what Dudley felt when his friend was bitten. But then, he began to speak.

"Harry, man," he said, placing a hand on my shoulder. I noticed that he had a strange accent, like one of those men in the films that Dudley occasionally watched on the telly. "You are a boy coming to a strange place, a place that you could easily die and no one would know, and you are asking me why you aren't trying to learn as much as you can? Really?"

He backed off and smirked at me, saying, "Your behavior amuses me. Continue."

Before I could offer a rebuttal (that's what I told myself later when I learned what a rebuttal was), a girl burst into the compartment. She had these ugly teeth that shone into my eyes (nearly blinding me) and a mop or a nest of curly brown hair.

"You two aren't going to make fun of someone likes to study, will you?" she asked exasperatedly, the murderous look on her face belying that sweet tone of hers might have worked on me.

"I—"

"By all means, enter," Amit said, cutting me off, as he stood up, took her hand, and kissed it. The girl seemed to be in the 'boys are nasty' phase', because she pulled back and grimaced, though Amit was undeterred. "I won't make fun of you, but I won't make any promises about Harry here."

He waved at me dismissively.

'_Yeah…thanks.'_

She rolled her eyes, slamming the compartment door behind her and sitting down next to me. This puzzled me, and so I put my question into words, "Why're you sitting next to me?"

Oh, now both of them are looking at me with that "Are you stupid?" look.

The girl ignored my question and said, "It looks we're going to be most of our year." She flipped her hair over her shoulder and made herself at home. She also pulled out a book, but unlike Amit's booklet, this was one of our textbooks. I only recognized it because it was the only book that weighed like a brick.

Amit seemed to have settled down nicely too, but I was curious about what she said. I saw earlier, at least two hundred of us on this train. In fact, many of the compartments are full because of that. I asked, "Why do you say that?"

"Look Harry with-no-last-name," She replied slowly, "How many of the upper years did you see when you came on to the train?"

I shrugged and tried, "…Fifty? Maybe less?"

"Thirty-eight," she replied. "That's about six students spread over every year above us. Why do you think that is when there are so many new students?"

"Maybe the school opened for more people?" I guessed.

She explained to me slowly and without the snarkiness that Amit had, "No, Harry. Think about the students in the upper years. What were they all doing when you saw them on the train?"

…Reading. They were all reading. I noted this to her.

"Well, at least you're observant, if not a tad unmotivated," She smiled at me, "I'm Hermione Granger; it is good to meet you, Mister Harry…"

"Harry Potter," I replied, muttering under my breath, "and I do too have a last name."

Hermione's lips twitched slightly, as if she was trying to contain a smile. She then added, "You'd best read up what you can. The others are still children, and probably won't be kept for much longer. Those twits…" I heard her add that last bit unnecessarily.

I blinked at her, but before I could ask anything, Amit interrupted and answered my question before I could voice it, "Harry, man, if you actually read the books, you'll see that mystery is a huge part of our magic. Why do you think it's all kept a secret? Did you even read the warning: 'Anyone who reveals magic to the world will be punished on the pain of death'_?_ You've got to have read that at least, right?"

"I… uh, Hagrid might have mentioned something about it," I said. I vaguely remembered the huge man who could hold my torso in the palm of his hand, telling me something about doing magic in public… not that I knew any magic. I asked, "So do either of you know any spells yet?"

Oh, there it is again.

Why do they keep looking at me with that "Are you stupid?" look?

"Harry," Amit placed his hand on my shoulder again. I had the oddest feeling he's about to mock me again, but for the sake of sating my curiosity, I restrained myself from pushing the tiny Indian boy away. "Harry," he said again. "None of us have even opened our Magic Circuits yet, let alone gotten a wand."

"…Unless there's something you would like to share," Hermione added, a look of burning curiosity naked in her in her eyes. She had set her book down and was leaning closer to me than I should have felt was comfortable. I could feel her hot breath down my neck, causing the hairs on my back to rise.

There was a sense of earnest pursuit of knowledge, along with something more devious in both of them. I could plainly see that much, but at the same time they were friendly and shared what they knew to me. Perhaps I was caving into their peer pressure or perhaps I was feeling camaraderie.

"I guess there's no harm in it…" I muttered and pulled out my wand. The stick looked like all the other wands in the shop, but this one had my name on it. In shining, golden letters engraved into the handle, it said:

_Harry Potter_

_Forty-Five Circuits_

_Fire and Wind _

For the next time minutes, I bore Amit's envious ranting and Hermione's constant requests to play with my wand. I did not see it at first, but they were both fountains of knowledge if the right buttons were pushed. I learned many things that probably would have taken hours of reading to learn, but with these two around, my life would probably be easier.

First, I found that I had more than double what was considered normal. Supposedly, this was a good thing, but both of them were adamant on my not revealing this to any of our other prospective classmates. Apparently people formed groups to bully those who were different or better than them at the academics… imagine that. But Hagrid had told me something similar too, something along the lines of not revealing that I already had a wand to any of my classmates.

Before long, the compartment transformed into a miniature lecture hall, with both Amit and Hermione teaching me the basics of being a Magus. I honestly can't remember what they told me, but it mustn't have been too important to have been forgotten so easily. What I do remember however, was that this was the first time I had spoken so easily with someone my age.

The biggest bully of the neighborhood being my cousin did me no favors, especially since I was his favorite target.

It was… nice.

I could have stayed in this compartment forever. So this was what it was like to have people who care for you, if only a little…

It was nice, but time flies when you're having fun. In this case, I had been having so much fun that in the blink of an eye, it was time to get dressed into the school uniform and get ready to disembark.

I know what you're thinking. You are probably thinking that magi all wear silly robes with silly pointed hats. It's a good thing we weren't. Our school uniform was the most dignified set of clothes I have worn my entire life. The custom-tailored button-up shirts with the silk suit made me feel awkward. It was awkward because I felt like I was worth something… wealthy even.

But of course, this hope for a better life was just the first step towards disappointment. At least I get to learn magecraft out of it.

I saw it, outside of our compartment window. I supposed I wasn't the only one who gasped at the sight of the old castle. So this was Hogwarts. It was a far cry from what the classic castles of England looked like. In fact, it looked more like a mishmash of a medieval castle and a modern fortress, camouflaged to look like an enormous hill than anything else.

Hidden away in rocky cliffs and dense trees, even without magic it was well hidden. With magic, the multiple layers of Bounded Fields that I'm sure everyone on the train felt as we moved closer to our destination, no mundane would be able to find it. For a school for children without any heritage in this mysterious side of the world, it has far too many defenses.

"Harry, are you going to keep staring or start changing?" Amit asked in his usual deadpanned tone.

I nodded and smiled in that half-witted way that they seem to see me as and replied, "I'll be done in a second. It does look like a beauty, you know?"

"You have years to admire it, but only a few more seconds before Hermione breaks down our door. Do hurry up."

Amit didn't even bother looking up as I began putting on my uniform.

* * *

><p><em>Uncle Vernon loved the telly. You could usually tell by someone's build that they loved to sit in front of the telly, but then there were the people who were just too big. By all rights, Uncle Vernon had easily spent half his life on the sofa watching his programs.<em>

_He loved to watch action films on occasions. It's those American films with the big explosions from the mythical land of Hollywood. On those occasions, I was usually sent to bed early, but the sound from the telly was loud enough that my ears felt numb from listening within my cupboard. I had yet to see our neighbors complain to my Aunt and Uncle directly, but I have heard them complaining. I often wondered how my relatives were able to sleep to those sounds, but later rationalized that Dudley was just too fat to hear anything. Still, it was loud enough that my entire body shook from the vibrations in building._

…_this man before me? His voice is louder._

"_YER A MAGUS, 'ARRY!" The giant of a man boomed. He stood several times my height, like a large mountain in my path. When he patted me on the back, I almost felt over. He was wide too; I could fit two Dudleys in the same space that he stood in. Draped in that rain soaked leather coat and with his dark, shaggy mane in this dark, stormy night, I was almost too afraid he would eat me in a single bite. _

_I nodded at him, "…Yeah, I figured something was weird."_

"_ERR…" The giant frowned, "WELL, THIS IS AWKWARD."_

_I rubbed my ear, "Yeah, about that. Could you not yell so loud?"_

"_Yeh mean like this?" He asked, leaning close enough to bury me in his beard. It was still loud enough to shake my feet in these old trainers that Dudley handed down to me, but I would have preferred this to him earlier. But then he said, "Ah canut 'ear me self in this whisper, 'Arry. Ah won't know what ah'm sayin' if I canut 'ear me self. SO IT'S PROB'LY BEST AH TALK LIKE THIS."_

_I shuffled my feet, somewhat numb from being shaken by his voice. He stood at the door, casting a long shadow that darkened the whole room. I was quite shaken by his sudden appearance so it was quite understandable that I wanted to just collapse. I surprised myself by asking him, "S-sir… who are you? And… what did you do to my relatives?"_

"_WHA…? OH, AYE, YEH PROB'LY DON' EVEN REMEMBER ME! AH'M RUBEUS HAGRID, KEEPER O' THE KEYS AN' GROUNDSKEEPER O' HOGWARDS. YEH KNOW, THE SCHOOL YEH'LL BE GOIN' TA THIS COMIN' YEAR." He rumbled while scratching his head with a pink umbrella of all things. He took two steps in and the door shut itself behind him. He walked casually into the hut, passed the Dursleys, who were sitting together in a corner of the room. Somehow, they didn't utter a sound and ignored Hagrid completely._

_He walked up to Dudley and poked him in the ribs a few times._

_There was no response, except for the few squeals of pain that Dudley automatically responded with. The massive man named Hagrid turned back to me and smiled in a way that wasn't entirely friendly, "HYPNOSIS. YEH'LL LEARN IT IN YER FIRS' YEAR. IT'S ONE O' THE BASICS, YEH SEE? EVEN SOMEONE LIKE ME SELF CAN DO IT."_

_He looked me up and down before wondering, "WHA' DO THESE… DURSLEYS FEED YEH, 'ARRY? YER BARELY SKIN 'N BONES!" He then proceeded to make his point by pulling up my arm between his thumb and forefinger and then shaking my entire body with it._

"_Just the same thing they eat," I replied. This was true; while I ate their leftovers, it was still the same food they fed themselves. I only ate a tenth of what they did. But I would rather leave that part out right now, in case this man would get mad and do something more permanent to my relatives._

_They might have been mean to me, but they were still family._

_I can't really say I was surprised that I was something… strange. Hagrid explained to me that we were something called 'magus' but somewhere into his explanation my ears became a little deaf or perhaps I just couldn't understand his accent very well. I understood the basic gist of it, which was that I had heritage as part of a secret society that was around since the beginning of humanity. Just by belonging to this group, by accessing magecraft, I was better than 99 percent of the humans of the world._

_It was nice, finally knowing what I could do. It was also nice to know that I was a good kind of freak. Perhaps I won't go mad and lose sight of everything…_

* * *

><p>"<em>Oh no, no, no, no, no…" <em>

_A litany of denials spilled from my lips as I wept softly, my hands stained red by the fluids dripping from the snake guts covering my hands. It was disgusting, as the pungent smell of fear and death wafted to my nostrils, and I wanted to deny that my friend was dead. _

_But I couldn't, because that was reality. _

_I couldn't - wouldn't - even clean my hands, if only by wiping them on my oversized jeans. There was no use, when that would just move the taint of guilt elsewhere. This...this wasn't the first time that I had been disappointed, not even close. And wasn't going to be the last; I knew this much even at that young age. _

_My tiny hands just clenched into fists, causing the gooey snake flesh to ooze out of my grip._

_The misery, a purer, more refined version of the only emotion I knew at the age, tore at me, causing my mind to reel. My forehead throbbed with pain as the oily smell of hot asphalt entangled with the scents of slaughter, bringing the image of my friend being crushed, kicked, trampled, stepped on, beaten to death to my eyes - killed as I looked on powerlessly, a coward._

_I felt dizzy, nauseous, with the whole world spinning too quickly for me to catch up._

_I could hear the boys jeering at me, but their voices were distant - they didn't even seem entirely real - as they turned their backs and shuffled away, having lost interest after seeing me break down in tears._

_I retched, feeling the burn of bile rising my throat. I tried to stop it, to push back this sense of disgust, but it was more than I could keep down._

_I was overwhelmed._

_Stomach acid burned my throat, though as a small mercy, I was at least able to hold in my humiliation until the moment they left, when the watery contents of my breakfast and lunch were expelled from my body in retching, heaving chunks. _

_Hot tears rolled down my cheeks, and I asked no one in particular, "Why…?"_

"…_Why whywhywhywhy?" I wondered. _

_Why had this senseless act of violence happened?_

_The Dursleys, being such a normal and upright family, had raised me to be a Christian like them. They had taught me to believe in a supreme power, an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being that governed the universe. It was something to thank for all our fortunes and blame for all our misfortunes. _

_...but could I even blame this on that deity? _

"_Why…?"_

_The skin of my knees hurt from the roughness of all the tiny pebbles that pushed against me. Under the scorching sun, the vital liquids of my first friend, that simple garden snake, dried up quickly. My mind felt broken, with a single unanswered question that tempted me. _

Why? Why had this happened?_ My jaw twitched and flexed without my control. _Why?

_Why?_

_Everything began to hurt as the darkness closed in, yet my question went unanswered. I knelt in the heat for hours, weeping, raging until the sun set and the cold moon rose, but nothing came to me. Those few hours, so fleeting to most, were an eternity to me, lost as I was in my thoughts. _

_I don't know what I did. I don't know what was on my mind. I don't even know how I managed to walk home that day._

_Blood, half-digested food, and a veritable mix of bodily liquids dripped from my lips. The sticky, mostly dried blood on my hands irritated my skin, but I did not wipe it off. I…_

_Disappointment descended. No answer came to me that day. No miraculous solution appeared before my eyes. What was I suffering for?_

_I didn't know..._

* * *

><p>"Harry… Potter," A shadowy figure drawled from the doorway, his piercing gaze causing me to fidget in my seat. "...the new celebrity of the castle. You are an interesting exception to the rules... aren't you, Mister Potter?"<p>

I'd been separated from the other students and brought to this... office of sorts... earlier by a stern-looking woman who looked old enough to be my grandmother. And here I'd waited, since she had told me to stay in this room until someone came to pick me up.

I didn't exactly mind, since it was a large (but then any room larger than a cubic meter was large to me) and _interesting_ office, lined with bookshelves filled a neat assortment of thick files, an air of something malevolent and old lingering about, with a smell of exotic spices and old leather. The desk before me was too tall for me to stare over completely, and the comfortable, leather-padded chair I was sitting in was too tall for me to peer all the way around to see the man at the door.

Still, before this stranger arrived, I had been fidgeting in my seat.

Life had taught me to be afraid of being different from the crowd, but at the same time, I wanted to explore what this new world offered to me. And added to that...well, my body wasn't used to wearing something tailored for me - with blazer and trousers that fit my thin body just right, since I'd worn oversized hand-me-downs all my life.

I didn't know whether to straighten or to hunch over as the man approached me, his footsteps echoing sharply against the granite floor. He circled me like a vulture, glaring down a distinctively large nose as cold, dark eyes sized me up like a slab of meat at the butcher's. Or perhaps I should say like a crow? HIs features were rather hidden by his mop of long, black hair.

To this day, I have no idea whether I passed or failed, only that he seemed to have found what he was looking for as he nodded slowly and moved to sit across from me.

"It's... a pity that circumstances forced you to stand out so early," the man sighed, leaning forward to better look at me as I shrunk away instinctively. Something sinister lurked behind his gaze, reminding me of something I couldn't quite place, so that even with him sneering at me, I feared him. "It's a pity, Mister Potter."

What scant illumination came through the tinted windows of the office served only to lengthen the shadows, obscuring the features of my watcher. He seemed to realize this, and so snapped his fingers, causing all the candles that lined his walls to light up one after the other, from those closest to him moving to the farthest from him.

Despite myself, I was rather stunned. I mean, intellectually, I could tell this wasn't much different from flipping a switch, but he hadn't flipped a switch. He'd just snapped his fingers...

I suppose he must have expected me to say something, since his frown only deepened as he regarded my expression.

"Are you mute, Mister Potter?" he asked acerbically. "Or perhaps this castle's wards simply struck you dumb?"

"Y-yes sir...I mean, no sir!" I answered, startled by the sudden question.

"Clearly," he replied, managing to pack more derision into that word than most managed in an hour of invective as he looked down at me with an odd half-lidded glaze, "You have your father's wit, Mr. Potter. I cannot say that it is an honor to meet you, but I will deduce that we will meet many times in the years to come. I," he said imperiously, standing up with a swirl of his cloak, "am Severus Snape-Prince, _Professor_ of the Art of Alchemy. You will find that I have little patience for fools… and neither does this Academy. Now… the wand that you have, I need to see it."

I must have scrunched my face expression, because this Professor's attitude was obviously hostile. The wand was one of the few things I had left from my parents, so why would he want to see it?

"_Now_, Mr. Potter," Professor Snape added, his dark eyes focusing on me intently. "You will find that making me repeat myself will often result in... _punishment_."

Something foreign prickled at my skin, sending a shiver down my spine. I didn't know what it was - only that I couldn't breathe. It was as if everything I feared and dreaded was lurking just beneath the surface of reality, that any movement I made, any word I said would cause them to emerge and swallow me up whole.

Except... _except if I surrendered my wand._

As if moving by itself, my hand pulled my wand from its holster in the inner breast pocket of my jacket, laying it down on the desk before me, upon which the impending sense of death faded.

I blinked in surprise, barely keeping myself from collapsing in a heap as Professor Snape picked up my wand delicately, scrutinizing even detail of it.

After a moment of turning it around in his fingers, getting a good feel for it, he spoke up. But this time, his voice was almost...reverent.

"This... is of marvelous craftsmanship, Potter," he breathed, his words soft, almost _kind _in a way utterly unlike those of earlier. "This was made for you by your mother, then? I can see her work in the runes."

"Yes, sir," I nodded, though I _hadn't_ known that my mother had made it, simply that it had been in my parents' locker when I was sent to claim their effects at the Clock Tower. By now, the foreign... stuff... that caressed my skin earlier was gone, and with its disappearance, I felt calm enough to ask the question on my mind. "Did… did you know my mother, sir?"

Without even glancing at me, he answered, "Yes, yes… we were close friends."

He didn't elaborate, but I could see from his expression that he was thinking of the past, of better times, his eyes glazing over as he looked into a scene out of memory and time.

Aunt Petunia often had that expression when she talked about her participation in sports before giving birth to Dudley. She would only talk about this with the neighborhood women when they had no other gossip to giggle over, though I would often overhear it as I sang in the choir.

Consciously, I don't think I noticed any of this, but being curious and lacking answers, I followed up on my question with another, "Could you tell me about my mother, Professor?"

My voice snapped him back to the present and an unfriendly, stormy frown marred his features. Collecting himself, Snape sneered and handed me my wand.

"Perhaps another time, Mr. Potter," he said noncommittally, though I was pretty sure that meant "No." "For now, you are to join your schoolmates in the dormitories." He paused for a moment, before adding a parting remark. "I am certain they will be quite pleased to see you."

His sarcasm was palpable...

…they were not pleased to see me.

In fact, my classmates from my year, or at least those who were sharing the dormitory with me, were all sprawled on their beds, groaning in agony. Of the two hundred or so students, or at least of the one hundred and fifty boys in my year, only twenty remained.

I knew this because we had to all share a room.

I tried to ask what was wrong, but no one answered; they were all in too much pain to do anything more than groan and lie there without moving a muscle.

I glanced at the only bed that was free, and as luck would have it, Amit occupied the bed next to mine.

_'He looks...horrible...'_

Blood trickled from his ears, his nose, the corner of his mouth...and I was pretty sure he was bleeding out of his eyes, but I couldn't tell, as the upper half of his face was covered by a thick layer of wrappings.

Still, Amit was in a better condition than perhaps half of our classmates.

I didn't know what caused this, but I could guess it was something that I must have gone through already. Perhaps one of the books would clue me in on this…


End file.
